Well, there has been this little red headed woodpecker hanging around where I walk. He is also a noisy litte feller, which I assume is his strategy to get at the insects. Well, I tried to get an image of him and tried and tried and tried. But between battery problems and slow camera boot up and this little feller just playing hard to get, I couldn't get it.

Well Best Buy had a sale on a new camera (and a lot of other stuff,) but I wasn't going to stand in line at 3 am just to get a chance for something. So the following day we went out there. Someone must have missed it, because they had one Kodak Easy Share Z712 camera left. I had some trouble convincing the clerk that this camera was the one on sale. Well, I very happily walked out of the store with a 7 megapixel, 12x zoom camera all for under $200.

Well early this week I got the following image. I only got one shot at him.



Yea, thats him sitting in the middle of the picture on a branch. He was quite a ways off and this is at maximum zoom. Not impressed, well look down below at just a small section of this image!















Its good enough that I can identify him now. We believe him to be a male Red Bellied Woodpecker. According to Wikopedia:

Red-bellied woodpeckers are noisy birds, and have many varies calls. Calls have been described as sounding like "churr-churr-churr" or "chuf-chuf-chuf" with an alternating "br-r-r-r-t" sound. Males tend to call and drum more frequently than females, but both sexes call.